Wednesday, August 09, 2006

Quick round trip to Houston

We leave for Houston in an hour or so. This will be a quick roundtrip, prelude to the big adventure: a two-day trip to Houston. I’ll get some blood drawn tonight at the hotel (no, that wasn’t a typo! They do bloodwork from 6-8 PM at the Rotary House). Then, tomorrow morning at 7:30, my Central Venous Catheter (CVC) will be surgically inserted (they’ll use an anesthetic called Versed, which I think I’ve had before—I’m saying it now because apparently I won’t remember it tomorrow afternoon…). Another blood-draw at 9:15, followed by something else (a visit with the Transplant Unit’s social worker, I think). Meanwhile, Anna will be sitting through two (identical) classes about the care and feeding of the CVC, and at 4:00 we’ll go to a different Infusion unit, this one in the main building (whereas the Infusion unit where they will insert the CVC is in the Ambulatory Care Building), so Anna can do a live demonstration that she has understood the care-and-feeding classes. (Note that she spent quite a lot of time last year taking care of my PortOCath and the PICC lines that succeeded it…) We’ll see Dr. Andersson, the transplant doctor, at 10:30 on Friday morning for what we presume will be the final go-ahead for the transplant—all the test results from last week will be in by then, and he’ll have had time to determine whether there’s anything that would prevent our going forward. Then, and only then, will we see the research nurse who will determine my actual date of admission to the hospital by some sort of electronic coin-flip. (The admission date will be either Sunday the 13th or Wednesday the 16th, we know that much; but they won’t say which until after Dr. Andersson has approved the procedure.) And then we’ll come home, whether for 36 hours or a few days.Meanwhile, Ledia and her partner, Paul, have embarked on a much more pleasurable and fun journey: they’re floating down the Mississippi River from Minneapolis on big homemade rafts, which they’ve built along with a band of 30 or so other artists from New York, San Francisco, and points in between. They plan to get as far as St. Louis, and maybe go on to New Orleans. There’s a great article about the Miss Rockaway Armada in today’s New York Times! There’s even some video. (The project site is at http://www.missrockaway.org.)